The rush to 4K/UHDTV
has elicited
the usual responses
from various corners
of the media and entertainment
industry. Much
like the move to HD,
consumer electronics
manufacturers are moving
forward in the anticipation
(or perhaps speculation) that the
television industry will respond in kind with
the content. At the 2014 CES there was no
shortage of announcements of these kinds
of efforts from Netflix to Amazon; broadcasters
as well successfully demonstrated over-the-
air transmissions of 4K content in the
Samsung booth. Despite grumblings from
industry pundits (like myself) that most of
the viewing public won’t be able to discern
the difference on average size screens and
that 4K will consume too much bandwidth,
vendors push forward regardless.

But what if even 4K is not enough? How
about 8K?

Japan, which never seems to sit still
when advancing new imaging technologies,
has decided that 4K is not enough and
is pushing 8K as the broadcast standard of
the future. Japan’s public broadcaster NHK
dubs its version of 8K “Super Hi-Vision,”
which provides about 16 times the resolution
of conventional 1080-line HD. It also
generates a proportionally greater amount
of data; for example, an uncompressed 8K
60-field image produces a data rate of about
24 Gbps. And it’s hardly new: The format has
been demonstrated for years at various trade
shows.

NHK, which has been leading these efforts,
announced the successful transmission
of 8K last month when SHV signals
were transmitted via a single standard UHF
terrestrial broadcast channel over a distance
of 27 km. According to NHK, the data was
fitted into a “standard” six MHz broadcast
channel via “image compression technologies”
and was transmitted using “ultra-multilevel”
orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
and multiple-input multiple-output
dual-polarization technologies.

This was followed up by another successful
test of 8K transmission, this time at an
event in Tokyo earlier this month in which a
team of both public and private technology
organizations conducted the world’s first
successful test of transmission, storage and
distribution of uncompressed 8K video over
a 100 Gbps Ethernet connection.

The Olympics, which has traditionally
been a test bed for new imaging technologies
is the driving force behind Japan’s push
to 8K. NHK reportedly is showing SHV footage
of the Sochi Winter Olympics to Japanese
audiences; and government officials
have made well known their intentions to
launch full-scale 8K broadcasting in time for
the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

At last year’s interBEE in Tokyo, a government
official drove that point home, announcing
that the country—which has so
far spent about $10 million in its 4K/8K efforts,
had moved testing for 4K forward to
this year, with full-scale viewing by 2016,
and that a timeline has been established to
develop the appropriate standards and infrastructure
to make 8K transmissions happen
by 2020.

Sharp and Samsung demonstrated 8K
displays at CES last month, and vendors
from Hitachi to Grass Valley at recent trade
shows have demonstrated cameras and editing
capabilities for the format so we can
expect more news at the upcoming NAB
Show.

But will 8K ever be feasible for the home?
Who knows; but we’ve been through these
debates enough to understand it doesn’t
really matter. The past several Consumer
Electronics Shows have proven that.

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8K makes a lot more sense than 4K. 4K is hardly noticable to the average viewer while 8K is a whole new world that has a 3D look. If you have not seen 8K at IBC or NAB, take a look this year. It is truly amazing and the viewer will really have a different experience than the barely noticable 4K difference.

I think we are going way too fast on this. But of course the bottom line is that it's a question for the market. If prices are right it will pick on, if not we will have to wait. Meanwhile we can't complain: the quality of HD or better, 4K is superb compared to the old SD or analog video. Best Regards.

As you said the plans for 8K from NHK are nothing new. The deadline of 2025 for broadcasting was set at least 5 years ago. 4K as an interim step was never planned. The set manufacturers are pushing this trying to fill the gap left by lacklustre profits from 3D. Here is my take:
Hooray for NHK, 8K is on the way. The problem is how is it going to get here (my living room).
If you look at the stuff I wrote for BE, I do know something about codecs and the tradeoff between temporal and spatial resolution.
Until someone proves me wrong I believe that recording a combination of pictures starting with low res Hi Frame Rate and ending with Hi res lo Frame rate will give us the ability to generate any in-between frame rate / resolution combination.
I propose a set of experiments to find the optimum combination of resolutions and frame rates for recording purposes.
Taking this approach will give us the opportunity to determine if it is even necessary to record Hi res Hi Frame Rate.

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